Should You DIY Your Google Ads?

I’ve been on a few discovery calls lately where the client mentioned they didn’t find value in leveraging paid advertising with Google. Typically, once we dig into their experience, I learn that they either DIY’ed their pay-per-click campaigns or they asked a friend to DIY Google ads on their behalf. Ultimately, the results were not what they expected and the experience left them feeling frustrated with paid Google as a marketing tactic.

The Problem with DIY Digital Marketing

I think we can all relate to the disappointment with DIY on some level. In my case, I’ll see an amazing cake design on Pinterest and try to recreate that at home. It looks easy and I can purchase all the materials at the local craft store. I can even access step-by-step instructions on how to recreate this exact cake design.

For me and my cake decorator aspirations, the missing piece is the experience and expertise needed to create this frosting masterpiece. While it looks easy, and all of the online resources say it should be easy, ultimately the person who designed this Pinterest-worthy dessert has years of experience and skills that were refined over time. I can’t match that with a few hours of online research and new frosting tips.

The exact same issue applies to a DIY approach to your digital marketing campaigns and paid Google ads. Building your own PPC campaigns looks pretty easy and straightforward. There are tons of YouTube videos with step-by-step instructions on how to open your Google Ads account and build your first campaign.

However. It takes skill and experience to do it well.

Skill and experience is the difference between digital marketing that converts to sales and spinning your wheels.

It’s important to remember that Google will bill your credit card whether the campaigns are well configured or not. So I often see DIYers wasting a lot of money and feeling frustrated.

Expertly Crafted Paid Google Ads

One of the primary benefits of working with a marketing agency is that your paid Google campaigns will be built with skill and experience. When you work with our team, your paid digital marketing campaigns are researched, built, and optimized by our in-house Digital Marketing Strategist, a Google Ads Certified partner.

With years of experience building paid campaigns in a variety of paid platforms (Google, Meta, etc.) her approach is highly strategic, tactical, and focused on your specific campaign goals.

Digital Marketing is not a “set it and forget it” tactic. We monitor all campaigns and make regular adjustments to optimize performance. We use additional layers and paid tools to ensure the entire customer journey is seamless and each conversion is counted. We also meet with each client monthly to review the data and assess performance against our key performance metrics (KPMs).

A Digital Marketing Case Study

The client is a small women’s health clinic offering a variety of services, including medical-grade aesthetic treatments such as body contouring and laser services. These MedSpa services are the focus of their paid digital campaign, including Google paid search and paid Meta ads.

Building this campaign, we leveraged the following tools:

• TRACKABLE PHONE NUMBER – Allowing us to link customers who viewed our paid ads and then dialed a phone, rather than clicking through. Without these tools and proper configuration, these connected conversions are lost.
• STRATEGIC LANDING PAGE – The client offers several robust women’s health services. We built their landing page to provide high-level information focused on this service line and encourage visitors to complete a lead form for more information.
• DIGITAL AD PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOL – This allows our team to organize all elements of the Google campaign into one dashboard. Building the campaign outside of Google first helps us be more strategic and collaborative in-house, and also gives our clients visibility they may not typically have with a traditional agency campaign process.

Strategically, we built multiple ad groups within Google and Meta to refine the campaign elements and target audience within each group, and to see how they performed against one another. In addition to a data-driven keyword list, we also utilize negative keywords to further refine our campaign performance.

As we moved through the first three months, we monitored performance on both platforms and made adjustments regularly.

Paid Digital Campaign Results

For this client, patient acquisition for these MedSpa services was their top priority. We are always excited to see high numbers of ad impressions and engagement (demonstrating success with brand awareness). However, our primary key performance metric here is cost per acquisition (CPA).

When looking at conversions, we need to ensure that the investment made to bring in each lead consistently lands below the revenue generated by the first customer interaction.

There are some cases where you might adjust the benchmark CPA based on business goals, but this is the KPM in this case.

• In the first month, the cost per acquisition came in at $400, which was on the high end of our target range. We also remember that Google stays in a learning phase for 4-6 weeks, so we expect this first month to be higher than normal.
• In the second month, we saw the CPA drop to $93 per lead and we continue to see the CPA in this range in month three.

After three months, we refreshed the images across the Meta campaigns (a good idea to do this every 2-3 months) and made additional tweaks to the campaign configurations in both platforms to maximize performance and adjust to changes in our data. We check in on this campaign frequently to identify additional optimizations and performance improvement opportunities.

Can You DIY Your Paid Google Ads?

It is absolutely possible to open a Google Ads account and fire up a DIY campaign. And Google makes it look really easy to do so (because they will charge you either way!)

But I am frequently reminded that we get what we pay for. You may feel like you’re saving money by doing it yourself, but what opportunities are you missing in terms of lead generation and sales?

If you want paid Google ads that perform well and convert, you should hire a professional.

And, of course, I happen to know a gal! 😉